Mo, if you had seen what I have seen, you would know that there is hoarding and hoarding.

My mother said her parents were hoarders, because they kept a number of interesting things, such as an 18th century microscope, a magic lantern, a stereoscope and a rotary knife cleaner, but their house was clean and spacious and liveable in.

She reacted to this perceived, but not to my mind, hoarding by throwing out the magic lantern and insisting that I gave the microscope which had been left to me, and which she thought was Victorian, to the local museum, from which it has disappeared, apparently.

I have more recently been involved with a hoarder's house. It is full of newspapers and knotted plastic bags of food in tins, and other knotted plastic bags containing rubbish to be thrown out, and not in neat stacks, either. It is hazardous, but it is how the owner wants it. After a tidy, which only touched the hall, the owner claimed that nothing could be found because it had been tidy before I messed it up by putting things into plastic crates and throwing out the rubbish bags (I had had to unknot all those bags). It is now worse than before. The house is full of stuff, and it is not the might be useful some day sort of stuff in any way. (I have that sort. I have to be scrupulous. I don't need the sort of thing that might be useful for classroom craft projects any more.) This is a psychological condition which needs help of some kind.

It is possible to identify events which may have caused it, which I won't do here, but there is definitely something not right, and I think it is fair, in this sort of case, to use the word pathological.